The cost of living

La vie en rose at the Ireland AM set; local tensions on Eircom League Weekly; the Flash Families splurge out of boredom; and the cast of Pride and Joy struggle to keep their home. By Dermot Bolger

If truth were told, TV3's output rarely taxes the brain of this television critic beyond the occasional bet about whether they are five seconds ahead or behind ITV in their myriad simultaneous broadcasts. I've had occasion to be a guest on their Ireland AM show (weekday mornings, 7am), where the presenters are invariably well-informed, engaging and so downright upbeat (if this is geographically possible) that I wondered at first if this could be the result of illicit substances. After several visits I realised that it was because, unlike their guests, they do not have to venture back out in the Dublin traffic at 8.30am from Ballymount industrial estate.

Presented by Trevor Welch, the Eircom League Weekly (TV3, Monday, 11.50pm) is highly watchable for League fans like myself, because there is no feud like a local feud, and who could not be fascinated by what Freud (a Rovers fan, in their Milltown days) termed "the narcissism of minor difference".

The purpose of some of the other TV3 programming occasionally taxes the brain. Take Flash Families (TV3, Thursday, 9pm), which, like Ronseal woodstain, does exactly what it says on the tin: an hour in the company of flash parents and their spoiled offspring. In this interactive age, any programme that charts the daily life of three families whose only claim to fame is an ability to spend money outrageously might at least give the viewer the chance to vote one out at each ad break. Alas, viewers had to endure all three to the end.

One thing that might bring sense to a mother who splashes out £1,100 on designer clothes to quieten her squabbling offspring on a boring afternoon, is a quick look at property prices in Dublin. Set in the Liberties in Dublin, Pride and Joy (RTÉ1, Saturday, 11.50pm) was a well-made film from husband-and-wife team Ronan Glennane and Neil Greenwood, produced on an initial budget of just €90,000 and shot in 18 days. Occasionally it betrays its financial strictures in its succession of long wide shots, with few close-ups and little camera movement, but this static quality is oddly arresting. They were blessed with securing another husband-and-wife team in Owen Roe and Michele Forbes, two of Ireland's most intelligent actors, who turn in beautifully honed performances as a couple that returns home from England to look after the wife's mother in her tiny Liberties house.

With a roof over their heads (albeit not their own), Dublin's property boom passes them by, since they expect that the house will be left to them. However, when the wife's mother dies, her will leaves it equally to her daughter and her wayward son, a compulsive gambler who has never accepted any responsibility for his mother. He delights in playing games and causing havoc in their lives, and they suddenly find that they can no longer take for granted the house that has been their home for years. Suddenly they move from being a settled, happily unhappy couple into being categorised as too old to interest financial institutions when they need to raise the money to buy off her brother. Pride and Joy has an intelligent script, filled with interesting moments like when the estranged husband tries to rent from a young whiz-kid, with two worlds colliding in understated exchanges. Aiden Kelly combines a nice mixture of menace, slyness and arrested adolescence as the wayward brother, with the excellent cast also including Sara James, Aonghus Óg McAnally and Rory Keenan. Recut with a final budget of $145,000, Pride and Joy packed a punch missing in many productions at 10 times that price and showed that, with a committed cast and crew, it is possible to make engaging and engaged films for less than what a flash family spends on knickknacks in a year.

Dermot Bolger reads with Joseph O'Connor and Anthony Glavin as part of the Fused Festival in Rathfarnham Castle at 3pm on Saturday 23 July. Details from www.southdublinlibraries.ie